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About Brian's Blunders
My Mission
Brian's Blunders recalls mistakes made during a 40 year career that started in the US Navy, moved to Michelin Tire Corporation, on to AFL where optical fiber cable is made and finished at Fibercore where specialty optical fiber is manufactured.
Discover the Blunders
Episode 1
Patent theft https://youtu.be/qWjLDLFx-lo Released 8/21/24
1. I call this one patent theft. In the mid 2000’s, I had a customer in Houston. A large oil&gas customer who I often visited and had a great relationship with. We collaborated on a few products together and I very much enjoyed working with them. Several years into the business, I went to visit them along with one of our sales guys. After a review of what we were doing for them and what we could offer, I asked if there were any problems that they were struggling with. They offered up an issue where they were trying to find a wire that was very strong but also as corrosion resistant as possible. The standard wire in the industry was GIPS – galvanized improved plow steel but this wire has limited corrosion resistance. They were looking for something with corrosion resistance that rivaled Inconel™ which is a very high nickel content metal that is used to some extent in wells that have high hydrogen sulfide. I conveyed that I had an idea that could work, and I detailed it out to them. The solution clearly had the corrosion resistance they were looking for and notably higher strength than just Inconel™ alone. They were interested in pursuing, and I estimated that we could do a trial in 3-4 weeks. They were very interested and asked if they could be at the factory when the trial was run, and I said sure. So, the day comes when we are running the trial and an engineer from the customer was there to witness it. I took him out to the factory to show him the setup and what we were planning to do. It was going to be another hour or so before the trial would start so I suggested we get some coffee and go to my office. Once we got to my office and sat down, I told the engineer that I was looking at submitting a patent on it as we felt it was a novel approach to the problem. The engineer told me not to bother as they had already submitted a patent on the idea. I asked if he included myself as the inventor since I was the one who came up with the idea and he said no. I was incredulous! What could I do though as he was my customer. I could challenge the patent application with the patent office or try to appeal to higher contacts in the organization. I asked if I could talk to their patent attorney and the engineer said he would put me in contact. A few weeks later, I did have a conversation with their patent attorney, and he conveyed that since the idea was presented on their premises that they owned it which is a bunch of bullshit. He told me that if I want to protect IP going forward, I should only listen in these meetings, take notes and not share any suggestions on how to solve problems. If I do have an idea that might be useful and patentable, I should go back to my company, file the patent application and then go back and present the idea to my customer. This is a crock of shit on so many levels. What should I have done differently? The NDA we had with the customer did not adequately address IP generated in this way. Of course, if the customer has no scruples then they would just ignore the NDA and the only option is to sue and who really wants to sue one of their most important customers. They ended up getting two patents on the idea and the “inventors” listed weren’t all in the room when I presented the idea. Ethics was lacking on their part.
Episode 2
Should have argued harder for the project https://youtu.be/lGcnhOwnd0M
2. I call this one, "should have argued harder for the project". I worked at Michelin when I got out of the Navy. I was hired as an Industrial Engineer and went through an intensive 6-month training. Michelin was great about that. I was only at Michelin for 18 months, but I remember it fondly. The people were great, and the environment was good to work in. At some point after my training, I was assigned a certain area to work in. For some reason though, and I can’t remember why, I got assigned a small project in another area. While I was doing that project, I realized there was a much bigger cost savings project that was related to what I was doing. I worked up the potential savings and what I thought it would take to get it done. It was a big project and would have taken 6-9 months to complete and a lot of convincing as it was a fundamental change in how the area, I was looking at was organized. I presented it to my boss, and he also felt it was worth pursuing but then he said something that totally ticked me off. He said, “This is great! I will let the Industrial Engineer that is over that area take on this project”. I knew that Industrial Engineer and he was a great guy, but he was not the kind of guy that would ever take on a project that would be all consuming and come with some reputation risk. He liked just doing his basic job and keeping under the radar. Handing that project to him meant it would never, ever get off the ground. I told my boss that I wanted the project, and I would do it in addition to my current job. He turned me down. At this point, I should have pressed harder. This was my blunder. As it turns out, I was right about the project, never getting off the ground. A few years after I left Michelin, I ran into an old colleague from Michelin, and I asked if anything interesting was going on. He excitedly shared that there was a project starting at a certain factory (not the one I was in) and it was getting a lot of attention given the huge cost savings that it represented. It was my friggin idea! At least it eventually happened. A side note, if I had been given that project, I might have stayed at Michelin longer. I wonder how that would have changed my career?!
Episode 3
If I only had a backbone https://youtu.be/sJFfoKMCQWI
In the mid to late 1990’s, I was in a quarterly review of business and development projects. The President of our company was there, and I am going to intentionally say his name – Frank Larence. Frank could be a nice guy but at times chose not to be. He is also the guy that wouldn’t move the sales and sales support from Brentwood, TN to the cable factory because his wife was a hot shot real estate person in the area. We could have avoided a lot of expenses by closing the Brentwood site. Anyway, back to the story. The way this meeting worked is each business group would get up and talk about their business health for the past 3 months and talk through development projects being worked on to increase our sales. As the meeting went on, Frank was hammering each group. He was being stern, but I wouldn’t call it abusive. The cable hardware group got up to do their presentation. The commercial guy did his bit and then the engineer that was going to talk about development was next. He was standing up ready to present. Frank went off about something and was slamming people and processes along the way. We knew that when this occurred, you just did the rope a dope and just took it. Right after he finished and we turned to the engineer to start his presentation, the engineer said something like, “Ohhh Kaaayyy, let’s move one” and it came across rather sarcastically. You can imagine how Frank reacted. He went off on this engineer in front of everyone. It lasted just a few minutes, but we were all shell shocked. This is where my blunder took place. I just watched a friend and fellow engineer getting absolutely abused by another person and I just fucking watched. The fact that the other 20 people in the room did the same thing is no consolation. I know that if I said anything, I would be Frank’s next target but I also look back now that I may have bolstered some others to speak out right then. If Frank was faced with 4 or 5 of us calling him out, it may have made a difference. I suspect that difference would have been a shorter career at AFL but maybe that wouldn’t have been a bad thing. Frank was toxic and so was his 2nd lieutenant who went on to become the President of AFL only to fall into disgrace himself.
Episode 4 - release date 9/11/24
Rogue Customer https://youtu.be/SE7OADOvZYU
As I was trying to grow the Specialty Cable business at AFL, I came up with a way to produce a fiber optic cable suitable for 260C. I won’t go into the details, but it was a game changer in the oil&gas space as they wanted a fiber optic cable that could survive and perform in a high temperature oil well. I presented this design option to a target customer who was an oil&gas service company. They were extremely interested and insisted on knowing the details. I resisted for a bit but the key guy I was talking to told me that they would not buy the product if they did not have the full material details. There was a bit more to the cable than just the materials in it but a specific material was a key attribute. After a bit of back and forth, I conveyed the information and let my contact know, in writing, that this was confidential information and was covered by our signed NDA. So, business started and was good for a while. Some years later, my contact quit the company he was working for, and I found out, not sure how at this point, that he was teaming up with a competitor of mine to build a factory in the US to make optical fiber and cable. The knowledge I shared with him would go to the new company, NDA or not, and there wasn’t much I could do about it. Luckily, the company he had worked for felt something wasn’t quite right and apparently locked down the facility and started digging. Ultimately my contact was banned from working in the oil and gas space and my competitor did not follow through on building an optical fiber and cable plant. Crisis averted, or so I thought. Years later, I left AFL and several of my competitors became much more open with me. Turns out, my contact from the service company basically told all my competitors how I was getting to 260C – every last one of them! So, what is the moral to the story? Keep your IP to yourself! My contact was going to buy my cable anyway – or at least now I think so. He was clearly a better poker player than I am. AFL has now exited the downhole fiber optic cable space. Would that outcome have been different if that trade secret had remained a secret? I’m not sure.
Episode 5
I should have gotten it in writing! https://youtu.be/n_TYEi7iijI
When I was at AFL and growing the Specialty Cable business, I started to get some traction in the late 2000’s. I was at $6 or $7M at the time with extremely good margins. I was getting a yearly raise of 2-3% - pretty much the same as most everyone else despite starting a new business and adding materially to our profitability. So, I sat down with my manager at the time to discuss. He indicated that in my paygrade, I was high in it so my pay increases would be limited. So, I asked the obvious question, how do I move to a higher pay grade? Isn’t starting a new business that is very promising and very profitable worth a bit more than 2-3% per year? He said that once I hit $10M a year that I could get that higher pay grade. I didn’t get it in writing! Dumbass. Time passes and my boss is replaced by another guy. I hit $10M in sales and I conveyed my past conversation with my new boss. He said that is not how it works and there would be no pay increase coming unless I was a GM, responsible for the P&L (profit and loss). The real story is the president of the company wasn’t ever going to give me a notable bump in pay nor a promotion. My boss knew that he had no chance of convincing the president of increasing my compensation. So, a few years later, when I got a call from the GM of Fibercore about a position, I was all ears and eventually accepted their offer. Note that in my final year, the Specialty Cable revenue was ~$23M with >50% EBITDA. I had an exit interview with the president of AFL and he stated that he thought I was going to leave several years earlier to get a higher salary. This confirmed my view that I was never going to get what was deserved and was basically being used. So, what should I have done differently? I should have pressed my first boss to put his “promise” in writing. I suspect he wasn’t authorized to make that promise but at least I would have known at that point. Maybe I would have done something different after that – not really sure. I greatly enjoyed the people I worked with directly and I viewed Specialty Cables as mine and I wanted to see it get to a point where it would continue without me. When I left, I felt it was there. My decision to leave was helped by the fact that oil prices plummeted at the end of 2014 and I knew it would be a struggle for awhile and due to this, my compensation would be lacking for a bit. In the end, it all worked out.
Episode 6
Time and place for a hard conversation https://youtu.be/9pKw7DeGP_U
When I was in the Navy, I was a nuclear engineer and was the watch officer in one of the engine rooms when we were underway. We worked 5 and dimes which means 5 hours on shift and then 10 hours off. Sounds decent until you realize that being a watch officer was only part of the job. I had a division to run as well. To run an engine room takes multiple people – reactor operator, electrical operator, throttleman, watch supervisor, messenger and others. As a watch officer I was responsible for the full engine room and my team. The quality of the people I worked with was stellar. We worked together well and dealt with the day-to-day issues that inevitably occur in an engine room. One of my responsibilities was to review the logs of several of the operators to view various parameters of their operating station. One of these was parameters that the messenger took care of. On the ship, there were various bilges that were only accessible via a reading tube, i.e. you couldn’t actually see the bilge so a measurement of how much water was done and documented. This was to ensure that we didn’t have a leak. Kind of important. I had some concerns with the messenger on our watch after reviewing his readings. They seemed too stable. The ship is moving, water will slosh around a bit and the reading should vary some from hour to hour. I suspected he wasn’t doing the readings but was “pencil whipping” them which means he was falsifying them. Obviously, this is a big issue. I pulled the watch supervisor over and conveyed my concerns. I asked him to put sticky notes on each of the measurement spots indicating that I wanted the messenger to call me when he saw the note. The calls never came. I asked the watch supervisor to go retrieve the stick notes which were meant to confirm that the measurements were not taken. He found all the stick notes still in place. During the elapsed time, the messenger should have done two measurements in each place. He clearly hadn’t done them yet there were readings on his log. Here is where I made a blunder. I confronted the messenger in the middle of the engine room clearly within earshot of 3 or 4 other people. I dismissed him from the watch and told him not to do watch again. I should have waited until after the watch was done and talked to him privately. It did not need to be in a public space. This was just wrong.
Episode 7
Lack of respect https://youtu.be/X5isRw986H8
In the early 2000’s, I developed a habit of saying “que paso” or “que pasa” when people entered my office. I grew up in central Texas and had often heard these phrases used as a common greeting. I used it often over a period of months and didn’t really think much about it. I’m not sure what most of my coworkers thought of it as I never asked and none made any comment about it, until one guy did. He was a young applications engineer who came from Columbia. After he came into my office after my usual greeting, he looked uncomfortable. I asked him why and he stated that he felt my greeting was inappropriate and it offended him. I was horrified that something I was doing so casually was so offensive to him. My lack of awareness was a blunder. I apologized to him and said I would stop – and I did immediately. After all these years, I obviously still think about it and the disrespect I had shown to him and possibly others. I have huge respect to this individual for standing up and correcting my approach. Words matter.
Episode 8
Should have gotten the patent https://youtu.be/VUKP42r7r8A
In the mid to late 1990’s, we had a push to develop new designs of an aerial fiber optic cable called Optical Ground Wire(OPGW). At the time, AFL and its competitors each had one approach to making OPGW and each one dissed the others designs for various reasons. The reality is that most of them had their place but the product managers at each company were loath to admit it. AFL’s product manager was no different until the market moved in a direction, higher fiber counts, that could not be serviced with the existing technology. Finally, the product manager got onboard with looking at different options so we kicked off multiple projects to see what would come out best. We got there on the higher fiber count about 6 months before anyone else so that all worked out well. One of the offshoots that came out of the project was what AFL calls “CentraCore”. It allows for a moderately high fiber count in a very small diameter cable. It was a game changer, and I knew it the second that our Development Engineer (there will be another story about him later!) told me about the idea. When we told the product manager about the idea his response was, “Why the hell would we do that? “ Needless to say, we persisted and eventually got him onboard with the idea. At the time, I chose not to pursue a patent which turned out to be a bad blunder. My view was that it wasn’t novel enough to warrant a patent application. In the US, it is way too easy to get a patent and I should have had the Development Engineer submit an invention disclosure to kick off the process. “CentraCore” went on to become a tremendous success. It should have been protected by IP in some way – even if it was a weak US patent. Patents are costly to get and maintain but I knew this product was going to be very successful the moment I heard about it. I screwed up.
Episode 9
Way too open with a customer https://youtu.be/Bs3DHHlliGQ
In the mid-1990’s, we were selling boatloads of cable to the Chinese. It was great business, and the potential was huge given the size of China. This was well before China became the economic behemoth that it is today. So, one of our Chinese customers wanted to come visit our factory. We often hosted customers from around the world, so this was nothing new. The customer came with a huge group – probably around 10 people. I can’t remember if we got an interpreter or if they brought one but nevertheless, there was one there. We brought them all into a conference room and proceeded with presentations on our company and products. Our Plant Manager at the time, had a funny habit of always talking very loudly when his audience didn’t speak a lick of English. I mean really loud. I still look back on it and laugh. Anyway, the presentations wrapped up and it was time for a factory tour – which we did for everyone. We were very open with customers – probably too open. The lead person from our Chinese customer asked if they could take pictures. Our plant manager said, “Sure, no problem”. What a mistake. I thought it was a mistake at the time but failed to say anything. We took them to the shop floor and out came multiple cameras from the group. No telling how many pictures were taken. Looking back, I suspect many of the Chinese were engineers with the sole intent on finding out how we made the product, where we got our equipment and who our material suppliers were. It was all there for the taking on the shop floor. It took a few years but eventually, our sales into China stopped completely. It was clear they were making their own at that point. Did the pictures that were taken during the tour speed up the process of China making their own product? Maybe. It sure didn’t slow them down. Looking back, I should have said something to limit the pictures they could take. I suspect many US manufacturers made the same blunder as we did. Key lesson is to avoid teaching your customer how your product is made – especially if they are from a low-cost manufacturing country.
Episode 10
Not advocating for a key guy https://youtu.be/0bHKQIZI9Pk
In the mid to late 1990’s, I was over operations, process engineering and R&D for the optical ground wire(OPGW) area at AFL. Our product manager realized that we needed to expand our product offering in the OPGW market to allow us to get to higher fiber counts. I hired a guy out of Texas. A middle-aged guy with a fair bit of experience in multiple areas and he came recommended by a co-worker named Harvey Blumsack. I do try to avoid saying specific names in my blunders, but I will deviate in this case. Harvey Blumsack was the guy who designed the first transatlantic fiber optic cable. He came to AFL through an acquisition, and I got to know him reasonably well. He was incredibly bright and one of the nicest people I had ever met. His recommendation meant a lot to me in making the decision to hire this R&D guy. So, the guy starts with AFL and starts to get an understanding of what we do and possible options. Over the course of two years, he was instrumental in getting us several new offerings. He didn’t do it alone but without him, it would not have happened in the time frame it did and with business, time is money. He was involved in getting us to a 144-fiber count design, a 432 fiber count design, a very low cost option for fiber counts 72 fibers and below, a design that was capable of 72 fibers that was very small but also achieved a reasonably high conductivity and then the smallest 72 fiber design that had ever been done. A pretty amazing list of contributions to AFL. This R&D guy and I got along great. He was not a polished guy by any means and didn’t always present his ideas in the smoothest way. This seemed to irk our product manager – a lot! The product manager seemed to always make disparaging comments about this R&D guy to the point that some in upper management questions this R&D guys ability and contribution. It really pissed me off. Because this R&D guy was not some golf swinging, powerpoint creating, alcohol infused frat rat, he was not viewed favorably. I did push back but in looking back, I should have pushed back harder. When the telecom crash happened, AFL’s business dropped dramatically and as we were looking for cuts to make, this R&D guy’s name came up quickly. Too quickly. Because of the perception that had been created by the product manager, this R&D guy got the axe early on. In truth, it would have happened eventually as we went through 7 rounds of cuts. No one was safe and with no business coming in and customers not looking for new products, R&D was going to be curtailed greatly. I should have advocated for this R&D guy more forcefully – it would have bought him more time – which may or may not have been good for him. I’ll never know though.
Episode 11
Trust but verify or don't trust and still verify https://youtu.be/JHRUq3sWc8k
This is a two part blunder story- First part is trust but verify or don’t trust and still verify. In the early 1990’s, I was the process engineering manager for the optical ground wire(OPGW) group. Each week I would get with my process engineers and talk about their area and what equipment issues they had. In one area, the cabling area, there was an issue that the process engineer brought up. During the cabling of the fiber optic components, the core was wrapped with polymer tape. On occasion, the tape would break and if the operator was not prompt with shutting down the machine, there would be a few 10’s of meters without tape. The operator would then have to wrap the tape by hand, which was extremely time consuming. The knock-on effect was that the operators would intentionally run the machine slower than it was capable of so in the event of a tape break, there wouldn’t be so much tape to wrap by hand. So, in my meeting with that process engineer I asked if the machine had a tape break sensor. He said it did but didn’t work so I put it on the maintenance list. This was my first blunder. I should have delved into this one much more than I did. I assumed, wrongly, that the process engineer had done their due diligence and fully investigated this issue. The problem could have been solved much earlier and with no drama if I would have asked a few more questions of my process engineer. As you will see in Part 2 of this blunder, the situation spiraled a bit out of control which was completely unnecessary.
This is a the second part of a blunder – Trust but verify or don’t trust and still verify. Each week, I would submit the list to the maintenance manager, and we would talk through each issue. I had put an issue about a broken tape break sensor on the list. He said he would get his guys to come out and take a look. For weeks on end, he indicated they didn’t have time to get to it. Months went by and no progress. I started getting more forceful on getting this issue prioritized with him and his team. About six months into this, I had had enough of the delays and pressed him hard. He stated that “they had fixed it a couple of times but then it stopped working”. This was news to me, and I asked when was it ever fixed? I had never heard that and neither had the process engineer. I told him that I wanted to bring in a contractor to handle it. He didn’t have much of a leg to stand on, so he agreed -much to my surprise. I pulled a guy that I knew at Michelin who was an electrician but had the reputation of being able to fix almost anything. I contracted with him for 40 hours of time and arranged for him to come in. The maintenance manager insisted, and rightly so, to have one of his guys with him the whole time. I also had the process engineer there the whole time. On the very first visit, my electrician contact asked a very basic question – show me the prints to the machine. Unfortunately, my process engineer never asked that question before and I had assumed he had done his diligence – this was one of a few blunders. So, they go and find the prints and go back out to the machine. After a short bit of time the electrician found the circuit for the tape break detector and started comparing the drawing to the machine itself. On the drawing, the electrician found what would trip if the tape broke. He went to the machine to find this part – it wasn’t there. The tape break sensor could never work without this part. The process engineer and another technician realized they could cobble together something quickly – and they did. After this part was installed, it was time for a test. The machine was started, and the tape intentionally broken to see what would happen. The machine stopped as it was supposed to. So, the maintenance manager lied to me about the machine being fixed and then breaking again. I suspect it was his guys who lied to him in fairness. Why the lies? No idea. AFL was pretty dysfunctional when I got there with a weird tension between operations, quality and maintenance/engineering. I went to the maintenance manager and told him what would happen and highlighted the fact that the machine could never have been working as it was missing a part. I showed way too much emotion in this interaction which only made my relationship with the maintenance manager worse. This was a blunder that had a long-lasting impact as that maintenance manager and I continued to be coworkers until I left. I never apologized and I should have. Things could have and should have been different. I didn’t rise above it all.
Episode 12
Get it in writing (again!) https://youtu.be/oe4tfAfWjsY
You would think I would learn. While at the last company I worked for, which was owned by a venture capital group, I knew that at some point, we would be sold. As part of my employment agreement, I would get a yearly bonus based on metrics which were to be agreed upon between my boss and me. It also included a clause where I would get a small piece of the pie if and when we sold. So, the day came when we were sold, and it was about 6 months into our fiscal year. We were having a very good year at that point as we were trying just about anything to get our revenues up to help entice a buyer. So, I got the piece of the pie and was very grateful for that. Here comes the problem. My boss was notorious for not documenting anything. The year before, I had no bonus metrics although there was a sales target. He and the board decided what I would get, and it was more than reasonable. Ok – nothing documented but my boss came through. Not really what I was used to, but I realized at that point, my boss was never going to take the time to figure out my bonus objectives. In my view, the objective was to bring in the sales given I was head of sales. Pretty obvious. So, when we were sold, the company that bought us decided to move us to their fiscal year which started pretty much immediately. So, the 6 months of fiscal year that had passed before we got bought was done. I asked my boss about the bonus. He agreed I deserved a bonus, and he would talk to the HR Manager from the acquiring company. According to my boss, she asked to see the bonus plan for me. Of course there was nothing. She said that with no documented plan, no bonus would be forthcoming despite it being in my original employment agreement. So, I was faced with a bit of a dilemma. I had just gotten a nice check for the acquisition, and it appeared I would get another piece of the pie when our new company, which was also owned by a venture capital company. So, do I raise a stink about missing my bonus? Would it have done any good? If I raised a stink, would it impact what I would get when we were sold again? I decided to let it go. The lesson learned here is I should have gotten my bonus plan in writing. Given the nature of my boss, I could have put my own objectives in place and submitted them to my boss and HR. That probably would have done the trick. You would think I would have learned this lesson already.
Even more Blunders!
Episode 13
Trusting HR! https://youtu.be/wGZBTdDWTms
In the late 1990’s, we were adding a machine in the cable factory that would take optical fiber and put it into a stainless-steel tube while the tube was being manufactured. We had built a special room for this to ensure cleanliness, vibration control and temperature control. The machine was a step up in complexity as compared to the other equipment in the factory. As the Operations Manager/Process Engineering Manager, I wanted to have the best operators running this machine to hopefully get very high yields. I went to HR and told them what we were doing and that we would need 6 operators to run the machine over the shifts we planned to produce. I also knew that almost every operator in the plant would want to apply for these 6 positions as it was viewed as a premium job (the pay was no different). We needed a way to objectively rank people to guide us in the selection process. In that conversation with HR, we decided to administer a math test which was meant to be used as a part of the selection process – not the whole selection process. So, we administered the test and got the results. The top 6 were all males which wasn’t going to fly. Not for the reasons you might think. My experience in manufacturing is that if the work area is all men or all women, the results are not great. My first exposure to this phenomenon was in the area where we colored the optical fiber. When I started, it was all women. There was constant friction within the crew and between crews. All kinds of silly stuff going on. When we finally had an opening in the coloring area, I insisted on putting a guy into that position. HR objected but I insisted and got it through. After about 6 weeks of this guy being in the coloring area, I had several of the women come up to me thanking me for putting him in the open position. I asked why and the response was that having him there made the women stop fighting with each other. It made them behave and act more professionally. It also improved productivity. I had another area that was all men due to a lifting requirement. This area was always underperforming unless the supervisor or I was on them. They seemed to go out of their way to work as little as possible. Frustrating. Anyway, back to the selection process. Working with HR, we ended up selecting six people – 4 men and 2 women. A week or so later, on the bulletin board next to the canteen, the test scores from the math test were posted for everyone to see. We took it down immediately, but we never found out who posted it. It had to be someone from HR as they were the only ones who had full access to the list. As you can imagine, this created a fair bit of drama in the factory. I had some difficult conversations with those that scored higher on the math test than those selected for the positions. Very uncomfortable. In retrospect, I should have reviewed with HR who had access to the information and pushed to put safeguards in place to keep the information confidential. I trusted HR to do their job properly and they let me down. Frustrating.
Episode 14
Not valuing my time
During the early days of creating the Specialty Cables group at AFL, I was going after any and all possible opportunities to get business. In that process, I had an idea for a cable which was to create an optical fiber cable suitable for strain measurement at very high temperatures. I made a small sample of one of the ideas I came up with and started showing it around to various companies in the oil&gas space. I got a hit with one of the big oil companies. One of their scientists was very interested and saw the potential to see subsidence coming in a well. I’m not an expert by any means but on occasion (no idea how rare it is), the structure of the earth around a deep well will change as the oil is pumped out. That makes sense as the oil in a deep reservoir is under pressure due to all the strata above it. So as the oil is removed, the strata above it can move downward. Note that this can and does happen with water wells too. As the oil well structure itself is going through the strata, it will also move, and this movement can pretty much render the well useless. So, this scientist’s idea was to have a cable attached to the casing of the well (big metal pipe) and measure the strain on it whether that be compression or tension. The hope was that if they could see that the well was in danger of being damaged, they could do something about it. Not sure what they could do but there are a lot of crazy bright people in the oil&gas space that could figure it out. Look up the Lost Hills Field on Wikipeadia where it talks about 8-9 feet of subsidence and some areas subsiding 9” a year. Anyway, back to my blunder. The scientist asked if I could make more samples for testing and had a bit of a laundry list. I wanted to land this opportunity so priced it low intentionally. It ended up being way too low. I valued it assuming it would take 20 hours of work. I spent closer to 150 hours of work, and I was somewhat afraid or shy about going back and asking for more money. This distracted me from other opportunities, and it meant that I was doing work for free – not a great way to hit revenue numbers. In retrospect, I should have laid out the situation with my contact as soon as I realized my blunder to stop the bleeding. Over some years, the project moved forward with a big oil service company. I came up with another design that was more effective but a complete bear to make. We made a length for the service company for them to play with. Unfortunately, they played with it for years and by the time they were ready to move forward, the equipment we had that we made the product on was scrapped as it was for a product we obsoleted. I heard through the grapevine, the service company found a way to start making the product on their own. No idea where that stands. Oh, and I didn’t patent the damn thing which seems to be a reoccurring blunder!
Episode 15
No time off when the boys were born
In 1993, my wife was pregnant with our first child. As the time approached for the big event, I talked to my boss at the time who was the Operations Manager. He told me that I had to take vacation for anytime off I wanted including the day of the big event. I thought this was odd but didn’t push back. This was my blunder. The same thing happened on our second child. Had to burn another 2 or 3 days of vacation. My boss was a nice guy but was old school and had no kids. He didn’t see any reason to give me a couple of days for the kids birth. I never thought about going to HR to talk it through. On my third kid, I reported to the plant manager and his admin assistant handled all the vacation admin for his direct reports. I told her I was going to need to take some vacation when my child was born, and she asked why? I told her what occurred on my previous two kids, and she was horrified and told me I should take the time off that was needed and I would not need to use vacation time. The expectation was that I would only be out for 2 or 3 days. So, my first boss basically screwed me out of 4-6 days of vacation. Good for him. Although he was “nice”, he was clearly a full-blown jerk in regard to the time off with my first two children. I shouldn’t have blindly accepted what he said in the first place which was my blunder.
Episode 16
Let's go see the Leaning Tower of Pisa
When I was in the Navy, our ship had a 6-month deployment into the Mediterranean. We ported in multiple places with several stops in Italy and France. On one stop in La Spezia, Italy, a group of officers went out one night and as typical, we drank way too much. The next day, four of us decided to catch a train to go see the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It was a hot day and a bit of a hike to the train station. Note that our ship had a buddy system in place which meant that you always had to be with another sailor. So, after a 30-40 minute walk in the hot sun, we were within 50-100 yards of the train station. The train ride would have been about an hour. At that point, one of the guys in the group who happened to be my boss at the time, said that he changed his mind and wanted to go back to the ship. Another one chimed in that he should go back as well to get some work done. The third guy said something about being tired and didn’t want to go to Pisa. So, I was the lone man standing who wanted to go to Pisa. Although I tried to convince the group to go, I had no luck. We weren’t going to be anywhere near this place again for the rest of the trip, so this was our once and only chance to go there. They weren’t budging, but neither was I. It got a bit contentious which led to my boss ordering me back to the ship. He was an arrogant asshole, but he did have the right to do that. It was a lawful order. Here is where my blunder takes place. I curtly stated, “Noted”, and turned around and started walking to the train station. None of the three moved to go with me. I was now breaking the buddy system along with disobeying a direct order. As soon as I got into the train station, I saw my room mate and another sailor who were heading to Pisa. I asked if I could tag along, and they said sure. So, for about 80 seconds, I did not have a buddy with me but the reality is I would have gone alone if necessary. I did not want to miss the chance to see the Leaning Tower of Pisa. So, we went and were able to go up it as well. Turns out that just a few months after we were there, they banned people from going up it. I know that lasted for many years. So, after a day there, we got back to the ship and when I got onboard, I was told to go find the XO (Executive Officer who is basically second in command). Turns out that he was looking for me earlier in the day and knew who I was with. When those three got back to the ship, he asked where I was and although they did try to cover for me, they eventually told him what happened. So, the XO let me have it and rightfully so. There was a meeting – not a Captains Mast as the Captain wasn’t there but there was the XO and another high-level officer or two. They asked me what happened, I told them everything. The XO said that he had to punish me for my actions, and I agreed he had to. He told me that I would be “put in hack” during our port call in Haifa, Isreal. “Put in hack” meant, in this case, that I couldn’t leave the ship. We were in port for 3 days and I would have worked on the ship one of them anyway. So, day one goes by, and I think I was on duty that day. That evening, I was hanging out in the wardroom around 20:00 (8pm for your civilian types). The XO came in and sort of hung out with me for a while. We chatted about where we were from and how we came to be in the Navy. He was kind of a gruff guy on the surface which is somewhat of a prerequisite for an XO but underneath that, he was a kind and fair person. On day two, I took duty for someone since I was on the ship anyway and that day ended up with me being in the wardroom that evening. In walks the XO and we start chatting about something – can’t remember the details. He then turned to me and told me that he thought the three that did not go to Pisa did kind of a shitty thing to me. I told him that I should have done a better job pleading my case or at least asked them to go into the train station to see if there was someone I could tag along with. I fell on my sword and said it was all on me. We talked for a while longer and he stood to get up to leave. Just as he was leaving, he turned around and told me that I could go into Haifa the next day if I wanted. I had served my time. A bit of a surprise to say the least. So, the next day, I went out with a buddy of mine to explore Haifa. Turns out Haifa is or at least was, the place to get diamonds. Both my buddy and I were in serious relationships and we both knew we would be popping the question soon. We headed off and found a place and spent an hour or so looking at diamonds before making a purchase. Thanks to the kind heart of the XO, I have a cool origin story for my wife’s diamond in her engagement ring.
Episode 17
Buying more than a company - product liability!
More liability than we thought. This blunder goes back to 2000 when AFL bought a competitor called FOCAS. I headed up the due diligence for the acquisition. I had been the Director of Technology for AFL up to that point but the GM decided to pull me to be full time on the due diligence process and the subsequent integration. I had no experience on this kind of thing so tapped into as many people as I could to get advice. There was a team together to do this project and there was experience with some of them so that helped out a fair bit. I read a couple of books on the subject as well. I tried to dive as deep as I could and create a laundry list of areas to look into and investigate prior to the deal going down. The intent was to turn over every rock to see if there was a snake there that could hurt us or if there was an undiscovered opportunity. So the deal finally goes down in May/June of 2020. A couple of months later, we got a call from a customer who had an order on FOCAS when we bought them and the order was completed a few weeks after the deal went down. The customer was in south Texas and I happen to be on vacation in Texas at the time so I volunteered to drive down to talk to the customer to see what was going on. The customer had bought a fair amount of a fiber optic cable called ADSS which stands for all dielectric self supporting. The cable is normally installed on the existing power lines below the phases. There is a well known issue with ADSS in certain environments that is called tracking. This occurs when contaminates such as salt, dust, smoke, fertilizer, pesticides and the like build up on the cable and don’t get washed off with rain (arid areas). Turns out where the cable was installed had pretty much all of these issues. If the cable was installed far enough away from the power lines, then the tracking issue would not occur. From first look, I could tell that the cable was too close to the power lines. The tracking is essentially a carbonized track created by electrical currents on the surface of the cable. The contaminates lower the surface electrical resistance allowing for the electrical current to flow. This starts to carbonize the surface of the cable creating a track which is even lower resistance making the current flow even easier. The track size increases and eventually works through the jacket thickness which then compromises the cable and the cable can literally break. So after my assessment, I told the customer that all the cable is at risk and it should be taken down or moved to a lower location on the poles. They didn’t want to hear it and did nothing for months which only meant the cable would be even more compromised and probably useless. We even came up with a novel solution that would have stopped any further damage without having to move the cable but the customer rejected it. The cost of our solution was about $200k and was backed by industry experts. The customer just wasn’t interested in any option other than full replacement which I can understand. Here is the blunder – legally, even though AFL didn’t accept the order and start it, since we finished it, we were responsible. This is how the terms were set in the agreement. This was a subtlety that I, and everyone else, missed. It ended up being quite the mess with the customer suing us for all costs and then us suing the engineering firm who was originally contracted by the customer to pick the cable and decide where it was installed on the electrical line. If I recall, the engineering firm sued the customer as well for not sharing all pertinent information. In the end, we forked over about $800k even though the cable met the requirements set out by the engineering firm. Our GM just wanted the whole thing to go away as he viewed it as a distraction and resource drain which was true. A steep price to pay in my view though.
Episode 18
$12M error in judgement
$12M hit due to arrogance. This one is a blunder of omission on my part. This one goes back to 2000 when AFL bought the company FOCAS which had facilities in Swindon, UK and in Alpharetta, GA. The Alpharetta facility made OPGW which competed with AFL and they had just started making ADSS which also competed with AFL. As mentioned in the last blunder, I headed up the due diligence and integration of FOCAS. About 2 months after the deal was done, I was still going to Alpharetta every week to ensure things were going to plan. We had let go the previous GM and CTO and most of the commercial staff leaving just operations. The operations manager was designated as the site manager as well. He was a bright guy and very critical of AFL – which should have been a red flag to all of us. He felt that he was notably better at running operations than AFL from a cost/efficiency standpoint and clearly wanted to make a name for himself so he could “teach” AFL how it should be done. He was a nice guy and not combative at all but clearly thought a lot of himself and his capability. This appealed to the GM of AFL who was my boss. This guy reached out to my boss, the AFL GM, and basically said, “hey, Brian is a nice guy and has done a good job but I’ve got this so can you have him stop coming to Alpharetta?”. My boss agreed and suddenly my role as integration manager was over. I told the GM that it was too early to pull out as not all the wrinkles had been ironed out but it fell on deaf ears – I was out and on to special projects while we figured out what I would do going forward. So I stopped tracking what was going on and went on to other things. A month or two later, I was offered to be the operations manager at the Swindon, UK facility. This was in late September and the plan was for my wife and I to go to Swindon in early November to check things out. I was very interested in an overseas assignment. So the trip comes and my wife and I make it to Swindon. I was checking my e-mail and got a note from the guy that headed up the applications engineering group about an issue with some ADSS cable made in the Alpharetta facility. I wasn’t aware they were making any at that point. The note indicated that the customer noticed that on receiving inspection that the optical performance wasn’t what it was supposed to be. He mentioned that the outside temperature was about 26 degrees when the cables were tested. Note that the cables tested in the factory were tested at room temperature or about 70 degrees. The note also indicated that the Alpharetta facility had made $12M worth of ADSS cable for this customer. I told my wife right then that we weren’t going to be going to Swindon for a job as I expected to get pulled into the issue and figure out what happened. I get back from the trip and the GM of the company told me that if I could sort the issue out and get the cables accepted in 6 weeks that I could take the Swindon job. I told him that was highly unlikely but would see what the investigation showed. Turns out shortly after I was pulled out of the Alpharetta plant, our commercial team was going after a $12M project but we didn’t have capacity at the AFL facility. The commercial lead went to the product engineer and asked if he could contact Alpharetta to see if they could make the product. So the product engineer and another key guy that was the key technical guy in regard to ADSS, called down to the operations manager in Alpharetta. They asked him if Alpharetta had a qualified design to make what the customer was asking. He answered yes. As I investigated further, turns out this was not true. Alpharetta had never made the design before. The Swindon facility had a theoretical design but it had never been made nor tested. What the operations manager ultimately did was to copy the AFL design which on the surface would seem okay, but this had a lot of assumptions build into it. It assumes that the processes between AFL and the Alpharetta facility were exactly the same – which they were not and everyone knew it. How did they know it? Right after the acquisition, I coordinated a two day meeting between the two sites going through a compare/contrast between the two sites – it was all documented and shared with the group. The conclusion was that a design from AFL could not just be dropped into the Alpharetta process and if it was, the cold temperature performance would be notably worse. This is why the $12M worth of cable at the customers site did not perform at cold temperatures which is kind of a deal breaker. Turns out that the operators at the Alpharetta site had raised concerns that they had never made the product before and the first cable made should go into the temperature chamber before any more cable was made but the operations manager nixed that idea stating they didn’t have the time to do that. When the news came out that all the cable was bad, you can imagine what happened next. The operations manager was fired immediately and his operations supervisor and the HR manager at the Alpharetta facility quit out of protest which was kind of weird. Not sure what they were trying to prove. I was asked to run the facility in Alpharetta while also figuring out a way to recover the cable in some way. I asked for Harvey Blumsack to come with me. Harvey was a cable guru if there ever was one. He designed and deployed the first trans-Atlantic fiber optic cable back in the 1980’s. He and I spent 5 months in Alpharetta together and I learned so much from him. We did figure out a way to recover the cable in time but the telecom bubble was starting to burst and the commercial team became uncertain if they could sell it even if reworked. Eventually all the cable got scrapped once the telecom bubble burst completely. The blunder I made was not pushing back harder when told to suspend my oversite of the Alpharetta facility. I’m not sure if I could have been successful as the GM was a very headstrong person but, never the less, I could have put up more resistance than I did. Personally, not going to the UK was a disappointment but it worked out for the best. If I would have gone to the UK, I would have spent 3 years or so there before coming back to the US. At that point, the telecom bubble had burst and AFL had gone through multiple layoffs. I may very well have been caught in a layoff. What ended up happening is I went back to the Director of Technology role. I survived all the layoffs and ended up being able to start the Specialty Cables group at AFL in 2004 which led to many wonderful experiences and put my career on a very different trajectory which was very rewarding. Sometimes a blunder can be a blessing? Seems strange but it is true.
I will post a blunder from the past - probably weekly but I'm retired so will do it when I get to it! Hopefully you will learn something...fyi-pictu
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